Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
